Whether you’re a public figure, media organization or other Page owner on Facebook, it’s important to understand who your followers are, what they care about, and what’s working for your audience. Page owners rely on their audience data – surfaced via Audience Insights – to get this information.

To make audience data even more meaningful for Pages, we’re updating the way Page likes are counted by removing memorialized and voluntarily deactivated accounts from Pages’ like counts. This change ensures that data on Facebook is consistent and up-to-date.

Removing inactive Facebook accounts

There are two primary benefits to removing voluntarily deactivated and memorialized Facebook accounts from Pages’ like counts:

Insights: Removing inactive Facebook accounts from Page audience data gives you up-to-date insights on the people who actively follow your Page. This will give you a better, more accurate understanding of who your fans are on Facebook.

Consistency: We already filter out likes and comments generated by deactivated or memorialized accounts from individual Page posts, so this update keeps data consistent.

What to expect

Over the coming weeks, if you’re a Page admin you should expect to see a small dip in your number of Page likes as a result of this update. It’s important to remember, though, that these removed likes represent people who were already inactive on Facebook.

Going forward, any accounts that are voluntarily deactivated or memorialized will be removed from your Page’s like count. If a deactivated account is reactivated, the account will be re-added to your Page’s like count.

Everyone benefits from meaningful information on Facebook. It’s our hope that this update makes your Page even more valuable.